Archives for August 2009

I thought this was very interesting. Mobile Marketing Watch, has a good post on Jumptap, who has received a patent related to using behavioral targeting to influence search results. For search, this is mostly ex-U.S. as far as I’m aware.

Your provider will share data about you (see the list below) with a third party search/adnetwork provider. And you, the customer, will benefit by seeing search results (ads) in an order influenced by this data. Sounds innocent enough and makes the marketer in me drool. As a consumer, I’m a bit uncomfortable with this notion, but I digress. So, is this big news? It is in mobile….but only If there’s scale <sigh> </sigh> The bigger question may be: Will scale come before regulation? My guess is “no,” at least here in the U.S. The current administration is beginning to look hard at behavioral targeting and privacy issues. It feels kinda creepy to me.

Here’s Mobile Marketing Watch’s take on what data will influence the search results:

The data derived from the carrier that influences the search results include:

Two or more demographics associated with the user, wherein the demographics are obtained from the billing system of the carrier.

Shopping habits of the user as recorded through use of the mobile communication facility, wherein the shopping habits include views of or purchases of goods or services.

Duration of on-line interactions by the user from using the mobile communication facility.

I would have gone a bit further, as I typically get passionate about things that seem obvious to me (apologies to M.D. for using the word passionate).

Here’s where I’m going: If a large and growing percentage of emails are opened on a mobile device, the email marketers (every e-commerce player) have a problem with their outbound emails as noted in the article. Check.

Some of the problems: 1) Often, they are not formatted for device 2) the links are to a www site that is slow, not technically optimized nor content-optimized for mobile use case 3) and MOST IMPORTANTLY – these users can’t act upon impulse to easily BUY anything from the merchant.

There is a stat in the article that deals with how many people will interact with the email a second time from their desktops. Even if I did believe that some significant portion of the audience will respond later via desktop to an offer they viewed on mobile, why would you force them to? Instead, I recommend providing an opportunity to buy right then and there from the mobile device.

This seems like an obvious opportunity to me.

Optimize your email program by learning the habits of your audience – or ask them.

Send mobile friendly emails

Create offers to mobile users that are time sensitive and compelling enough to act upon at the moment of impulse

Make it easy for them to click and buy right from their mobile device. I know of a great mobile web based credit card billing solution: Billing Revolution.

This report from Pew is mostly a retrospective on their previous research on teens mobile use. No surprises here….They plan to update in 2010. While penetration among teens will clearly keep growing, teens use of mobile for DR, activation, etc. is still a big question. Teen’s mobile web use also remains a big question.